It’s an ominous name for an ominous fruit: the black raspberry. As the owner of a new Raspberry Pi, I realized that I was going to have to, at some point, open the box and do something with it.
It was fortunate, therefore, that Limor Fried had been working hard on…well, actually, everything related to the Raspberry Pi. Limor and the Adafruit team designed cases, debugging cables, breakout boards, and everything you might need to do something awesome with the Raspberry Pi.
Most recently, Adafruit released a Linux distribution based on Raspbian (a Debian-based distribution). It is called Occidentalis, which takes its name from the black rasperry, rubus occidentalis.
As you know, rolling a Linux distro (from scratch or as an upstream modification of an existing distribution) is not easy work, so this is impressive unto itself. For a variety of reasons (in no small part because Limor sent me an email about it), I decided this would be the first operating system I would bring up on my Raspberry Pi.
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